After years of shedding office space, Microsoft is slowly reversing course as it calls workers back to the office.
The Redmond-based tech giant confirmed to The Seattle Times this week that it renewed the lease for its almost 400,000-square-foot office at Redmond Town Center, a shopping complex that includes office buildings. A report from local brokerage Broderick Group listed it as the largest lease transaction on the Eastside for the final three months of 2025.
Microsoft also said it's reoccupying 480,000 square feet of office space in the Millennium Corporate Park near downtown Redmond, confirming rumors among the real estate industry from last year after the company pulled the listing. Microsoft offered the offices for sublease in 2023.
Microsoft was one of the last holdouts supporting remote work in the tech industry. As peers like Amazon and Meta enacted return-to-office policies in 2023 and 2024, Microsoft maintained a hybrid work philosophy with little enforcement for in-office days.
But in a major shift for the remote work-friendly company, Microsoft announced last year that it would require workers in the office at least three days per week starting Feb. 23. The policy will only apply to employees living within 50 miles of a Microsoft office in the Puget Sound region but will eventually roll out to the rest of the company.
We’ve looked at how our teams work best, and the data is clear: when people work together in person more often, they thrive — they are more energized, empowered, and they deliver stronger results, said Amy Coleman, Microsoft's chief human resources officer, in a September memo to employees.
The decision to reoccupy those offices is based on various real estate strategies, a Microsoft spokesperson said. Among those is the return-to-office policy.
Microsoft's office moves in Redmond are a reversal from the trend the tech giant had been on coming out of the pandemic. The company stunned Bellevue city leaders in 2023 when it said it would vacate the 26-story City Center Plaza office tower the following year.
An almost-total exodus from Bellevue followed. The company said it wouldn't renew its leases for the two Bravern Towers in downtown Bellevue and also let most of its leases expire in the Lincoln Square North tower.
In all, Microsoft left behind almost 2 million square feet of office space in Bellevue among leases that expired between 2023 and 2025. It held on to a couple of floors in Lincoln Square North for its subsidiary, LinkedIn, according to city permits.
The contraction into Redmond also saw Microsoft fall off Bellevue's top employers list, leaving a hole that has since been filled by Amazon.
Microsoft's workforce peaked in Bellevue in 2021, with about 9,300 employees, according to city financial reports. Each following year that number fell, and in 2023, the company was no longer in the top 10. City records indicate the floors LinkedIn occupies can hold about 120 employees.
Microsoft did not comment on whether it plans to reoccupy space in Bellevue.
The company's recent renewals don't represent the gains that the Eastside real estate market is hoping for amid a postpandemic recovery, but they do keep two giant properties out of a saturated market.
Microsoft's decision to vacate 750,000 square feet of office space between The Bravern Towers was the hardest hit to the Eastside market last year, according to Broderick Group.
But other gains were made. Amazon signed a 77,000-square-foot lease in Redmond Town Center toward the end of last year. Artificial intelligence giant OpenAI snapped up several floors that previously belonged to Microsoft in downtown Bellevue. And at the beginning of 2025, e-commerce company eBay signed a 71,000-square-foot lease in Bellevue.
Broderick Group said several lease transactions are close to the finish line in early 2026 as tenant demand keeps ticking up.
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